Enterramientos infantiles durante el III y el II milenio AC en las cuencas alta y media del Tajoun estudio bioantropológico y arqueológico

Abstract

The aim of this study is to assess the social role of children during the Late Prehistory through the study of the funerary treatment they received from their communities. Eventual differences in the way adults and non-adults were buried are analyzed, as well as those existing among children. The methodological approach incorporates two kind of variables, archaeological and bioantropological. In the first ones, every archaeological feature involved in the funeral, such as the structure or the offerings have been considered. The bioanthropological data collected, which have been directly analyzed in this study, using the same criteria and method, consists of the age estimation, the sex determination and the observation of every pathological or no-pathological traits of the immature skeletons. This study relies on echlectic theoretical foundations, which, advocate for the possibility of approaching social inequalities through the analysis of several critical variables documented in the funerary record. This per¬spective essentially enables approaching the basic characteristics of the social relations and the organization of a certain group, through the analysis of their funerary patterns. To some extend, this study is also based on the Archaeology of gender, a movement emerged for making women vis¬ible, a segment of the society that traditionally remained unnoticed by researchers. Although during the first stages it was only focused on women roles, it also turned its attention to the children, as active members of the society, with their own interests. Considering these methodological and theoretical approaches, 268 non-adult individuals, from 34 sites in the upper and middle Tajo basin, belonging to the IlIrd and lInd Millennia cal BC, were analyzed. The data obtained were collected into a Filemaker database, specifically designed for this study and, then, statistically analyzed with SPSS software. For the first time the actual number of non-adults in the funerary contexts of this chronological period has been shown. The higher than expected proportion of children documented, allows to empirically reject the assumption that they were not represented in the burial contexts. Although some age groups present a lower number of individuals than expected, the amount of data collected is robust enough to identify some funerary patterns, which are exclusive of this segment of the society, so far forgotten.